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By:

Bhalchandra Chorghade

11 August 2025 at 1:54:18 pm

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker,...

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker, mentor and philanthropist — Dr Samudra has balanced many roles with commitment. While she manages a busy medical practice, her deeper calling has always been service. For her, medicine is not merely a profession but a responsibility towards the people who depend on her guidance. Nagpur to Panvel Born and raised in Nagpur, Dr Samudra completed her medical education there before moving to Mumbai in search of better opportunities. The early years were challenging. With determination, she and her husband Girish Samudra, an entrepreneur involved in underwater pipeline projects, chose to build their life in Panvel. At a time when the town was still developing and healthcare awareness was limited, she decided to make it both her workplace and home. What began with modest resources gradually grew into a trusted medical practice built on long-standing relationships with patients. Fighting Diabetes Recognising the growing threat of diabetes, Dr Samudra dedicated her career to treating and educating patients about the disease. Over the years, she has registered nearly 30,000 patients from Panvel and nearby areas. Yet she believes treatment alone is not enough. “Diabetes is a lifelong disease. Medicines are important, but patient education is equally critical. If people understand the condition, they can manage it better and prevent complications,” she says. For more than 27 years, she has organised an Annual Patients’ Education Programme, offering diagnostic tests at concessional rates and sessions on lifestyle management. Family, Practice With her husband frequently travelling for business, much of the responsibility of raising their two children fell on Dr Samudra. Instead of expanding her practice aggressively, she kept it close to home and adjusted her OPD timings around her children’s schedules. “It was not easy,” she recalls, “but I wanted to fulfil my responsibilities as a mother while continuing to serve my patients.” Beyond Medicine Today, Dr Samudra also devotes time to social initiatives through the Bharat Vikas Parishad, where she serves as Regional Head. Her projects include  Plastic Mukta Vasundhara , which promotes reduced use of single-use plastic, and  Sainik Ho Tumchyasathi , an initiative that sends Diwali  faral  (snack hamper) to Indian soldiers posted at the borders. Last year alone, 15,000 boxes were sent to troops. Despite decades of service, she measures success not in wealth but in goodwill. “I may not have earned huge money,” she says, “but I have earned immense love and respect from my patients. That is something I will always be grateful for.”

Unequal Law

Few legal asymmetries in India expose the uneasy bargain between secularism, vote-bank politics, and gender justice as starkly as the continuing permissibility of polygamy for Muslim men. While Hindu, Christian, Sikh and Parsi men have been bound by monogamy for decades, Sunni Muslim personal law still allows up to four wives.


For decades, India’s political class has treated Muslim polygamy as an awkward inheritance best left untouched. That uneasy settlement is now under strain following the recent landmark survey by the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), based on 2,508 Sunni women across seven states.


The survey has dragged the hidden costs of polygamy out of private misery and into the national ledger. Its findings are profoundly political. The BMMA documents sharp health deterioration among first wives: chronic sleep disorders, hypertension, migraines, thyroid dysfunction, menstrual problems and diabetes - all at rates significantly higher than among second wives. Mental health outcomes are grimmer still. Insomnia, anxiety, depression, helplessness and social withdrawal stalk the first wife with disturbing regularity.


Since Independence, successive governments have treated Muslim personal law as a domain too electorally sensitive to reform. The bitter memory of the Shah Bano case in 1985 when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-led government overturned a Supreme Court judgment granting maintenance rights to a divorced Muslim woman under pressure from conservative clerics has cast a long shadow. It taught politicians that touching Muslim personal law carried the price of organised backlash, and possibly electoral loss.


Apologists insist polygamy is rare, or that it is divinely regulated when in fact it embeds a hierarchy in law between men and women, and among women themselves. It legalises emotional, economic and sexual asymmetry under the authority of the state. It weakens women’s bargaining power inside marriage and normalises abandonment under the disguise of legality.


The Supreme Court has described polygamy as an “injurious practice” even while acknowledging its legal status under Muslim personal law. Several Muslim-majority countries - from Tunisia to Turkey - have banned it altogether. India, for all its constitutional claims, remains on the more regressive side of this divide.


Why the hesitation? The answer lies in the peculiar coalition that has guarded this privilege. Conservative religious bodies defend polygamy as theological necessity. So-called ‘secular intellectuals,’ wary of being seen as ‘majoritarian,’ treat criticism of regressive Muslim practices as cultural trespass.


This is not secularism but a clear abdication of women’s rights which these secularists and feminists claim to champion in so shrill a manner. The irony that these upholders of secularist values fail to see is that Muslim women themselves have been among the most persistent voices for change. They ask for the same marital certainty that other Indian women take for granted.


Banning polygamy may not instantaneously transform social behaviour. But it will declare, unambiguously, that the Indian state recognises only one equal partnership at a time. That is not a cultural imposition. It is the minimum architecture of modern gender justice. 


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